Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories From Wyoming - Softcover

Ehrlich, Gretel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803267541 ISBN 13: 9780803267541

Publisher: Bison Books, 2005

Synopsis

Drinking Dry Clouds is Gretel Ehrlich's storytelling in full swing. This inspired collection opens during World War II with the stories of cowboys, waitresses, and bartenders along with Japanese Americans interned at Wyoming’s Heart Mountain. Many of these characters were introduced in Ehrlich’s novel Heart Mountain. As she explains, “When I returned to my characters, five years after their initial appearance in my life, they seemed to want to report to me, so I let them speak in the first person.”

About this title

About the Author:

Gretel Ehrlich divides her time between California and Wyoming. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Distinguished Prose award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her books include This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold, and The Solace of Open Spaces.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ehrlich's skilled collection of 14 short stories complements her novel Heart Mountain but can be read independently. In fact, the first four stories, comprising slightly more than half of this volume, duplicate material from the novel, which is set in a WW II Japanese-American internment camp and a nearby Wyoming ranching community. Most of the new material comes in the second part, "After the War." These latter stories are interwoven, yet they place in the foreground different characters, all of whom are isolated in their own way. Henry is a former prisoner of war in Japan who returns home and has difficulty making the transition from surviving to living. Pinkey, a ranch hand who raised hell during his life, continues to do so after it ends--apparently, even death can't keep a good man down. "Kai's Mother" follows a Japanese woman who knows it is up to her alone to make a new life for herself and her elderly husband after four years in the camp; yet she remembers even more severe hardships from her childhood in "old Japan." And Velma Vermeer, the town's telephone operator, recalls how her whirlwind shipboard romance and marriage were tainted by tragedy from their very beginning.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0803267541
• ISBN 13: 9780803267541
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160